Leadership Culture

Tom Kelley, author of The Art of Innovation and the general manager of IDEO, the world-famous design firm, illuminates the strategies IDEO used to beat the devil's advocate and drive creativity throughout the organization.

Nolan Bushnell founded the groundbreaking gaming company Atari, the restaurant chain Chuck E. Cheese's, and two dozen other companies. He also launched Steve Jobs' career, along with those of many other brilliant creatives over the course of his five decades in business. In his eagerly awaited first book, Bushnell explains how to find, hire, and nurture the people who could turn your company into the next Atari or the next Apple.

A provocative work that challenges the traditional and widely accepted principles of business management - and proves that they are outdated, outmoded, or simply don't work. Do open floor plans really work? Are there companies that put their employees' welfare first, and their clients second? Are annual performance reviews necessary? Dr. David Burkus is a highly regarded and increasingly influential business school professor who challenges many of the established principles of business management.

In this audiobook, leading consultants Dick and Emily Axelrod share a way to meet that enables you to get work done right there in the meeting, an approach they’ve spent 30 years field testing. Using the same work-design principles that transformed the mind-numbing assembly line into the dynamic factory floor and make video games so engaging, they offer a flexible, repeatable process that has already been used to run thousands of productive meetings in all kinds of organizations.

More importantly, the world needs your humanized leadership. You must create trust, clearly communicate, coach powerfully, and customize every step of the way to the various types of people you are privileged to lead. This leader is ever aware that other humans execute the processes which drive the profits—people are always at the center.

In A Good Time to Be a Girl, Helena Morrissey sets out how we might achieve the next big breakthrough towards a truly inclusive modern society. Drawing on her experience as a City CEO, mother of nine, and founder of the influential 30% Club, which campaigns for gender-balanced UK company boards, her manifesto for new ways of working, living, loving and raising families is for everyone, not just women.

After five years of ground-breaking research, Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom share some unexpected answers, gripping stories, and a tapestry of unlikely connections. The Starfish and the Spider argues that organizations fall into two categories: traditional “spiders,” which have a rigid hierarchy and top-down leadership, and revolutionary “starfish,” which rely on the power of peer relationships. The Starfish and the Spider explores what happens when starfish take on spiders (such as the music industry vs. Napster, Kazaa, and the P2P services that followed).

Data and analytics have been reshaping countless industries as they turn from anecdotal to evidence-based practices. The recruiting and hiring processes, however, have been intuition-based. That changes today. Evidence-Based Recruiting introduces an entirely new approach - one that relies on irrefutable facts and data, enabling you and your organization to thrive in the new era of talent acquisition.

Deliberate Discomfort follows the journey of Jason Van Camp as a new Green Beret commander taking over a team of combat-hardened Special Forces veterans. This true story tells firsthand the intense, traumatic battles these warriors fought and won, sharing lessons learned from their incredible backgrounds. A cadre of scientists further break down each experience, translating them into digestible and relatable action items, allowing the listener to apply these lessons forged under fire to their own lives.

Traditional management training prioritizes clarity, predictability and control. In a matrix we need to be able to balance this with the ability to tolerate ambiguity, manage uncertainty and decentralize control. Managers need an expanded toolkit to help them move from the hard to the soft, from the concrete to the ambiguous and back again depending on the situation. Making the Matrix Work helps you develop your matrix mindset and will show you how to establish and engage networks that do not depend on role, control or authority to get things done.

The founder of Menlo Innovations and author of the business culture cult classic Joy, Inc. offers an inspirational guide to leaders seeking joy in the challenge of leading others. Filled with colorful anecdotes from Sheridan's personal journey and wisdom from many leadership mentors, Chief Joy Officer offers an approachable, down-to-earth philosophy and practice that will help even the most disillusioned of middle managers bring a renewed sense of purpose to their work building others.

A man finds himself on the top step of a stepladder; a woman removes the guard to her machine; a worker is not wearing her safety glasses in the plant. Why do these folks do these things? One tendency is to blame workers for safety errors and label their personal failings as the cause. Labeling does not solve the problems. These tendencies build dysfunctional management practices that create fear associated with your safety programs. I want to teach you a better way to analyze behaviors to understand why your employees were put in a position to take the risk in the first place.

There's so much more to the role of culture in business than etiquette and local customs. Recognizing its importance - and providing a clear-eyed look at how it works in real-life scenarios - is why Riding the Waves of Culture became essential learning when it was first published in 1997.

From years of research and practical experience as a consultant, Jeff DeGraff has learned that when it comes to any innovation initiative, disharmony is crucial. We innovate when we disrupt, and we first have to disrupt each other.

In the wake of economic downturn, foreign competition, spiking oil prices, and even war, American business throughout this decade has been thrust into crisis. To improve their performance, corporations everywhere have adopted a wide range of tools and techniques, yet many continue to struggle. Going Lean points to a better way.

What really distinguishes the people who literally change the world - those creative geniuses who give us one breakthrough after another? What differentiates Marie Curie or Elon Musk from the merely creative, the many one-hit wonders among us? Melissa Schilling, one of the world's leading experts on innovation, invites us into the lives of eight people - Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Elon Musk, Dean Kamen, Nikola Tesla, Marie Curie, Thomas Edison, and Steve Jobs - to identify the traits and experiences that drove them to make spectacular breakthroughs, over and over again.

Drawing on their years of experience working at remote companies DuckDuckGo and Automattic, plus dozens of interviews with leading experts, Ali Greene and Tamara Sanderson have written the ultimate playbook for managing remote teams.

Our industry has always dealt with change. But the environment we re navigating now requires change at a whole different level. We ve moved from experiencing episodic change to continuous change and as John Kotter has famously noted, that requires a whole different set of skills and a whole different level of urgency. In his new book, thought leader Quint Studer explains how to leverage the powerful values that have always defined healthcare people passion, fortitude, willingness to learn to meet the challenges of our disruptive external environment.

Change initiatives fail because humans are hardwired to return to what's worked for us in the past. This book offers a straightforward process for rewiring ourselves and those we lead to be more change-capable.

There are enormous differences between managing and coaching. Yet many companies and organizations encourage their leaders to coach teams without ever teaching them how. Nathan Jamail, a leading consultant, professional speaker, and the president of his own group of businesses, trains coaches at several Fortune 500 companies and learned that it takes not only different skills to achieve success, but a truly effective coach needs an organizational culture that creates and multiplies the success of every motivated team member.